So this is an ongoing story, but this is apparently happening to Parler:
There is lots of this stuff on Twitter – too much to include, but I will add a few links – and the dust is still settling, but the first version of the story is that: as a consequence of bad things happening in Washington DC, various third-party providers of authentication and trust communications services dropped Parler as a customer, laying-open their parlous* underlying data handling practices.
An alternative and more conservative analysis has it that the third-party services weren’t really relevant, and that Parler instead simply had built a batch of unprotected APIs which could be serially milked for original user data.
It doesn’t really matter how you slice this, but the outcome is that people gave a bunch of really precious information to a fast-growing website that didn’t really take the protection and deletion of the data terribly seriously, and now: people are worried.
This is the same risk which is created by the pursuit of #AgeVerification and #AgeAssurance in the UK, which I have previously written about at length:
- On the Digital Economy Bill
- Response to draft Guidance on Age-Verification Arrangements and draft Guidance on Ancillary Service Providers
- Why we need a ‘PCI’ for Porn Metadata
…with inadequate regulation of “how” to store such information in a secure way.
We should learn from Parler; not least: we should learn that it scares people to lose control of information, we should learn that security doesn’t come for free, and we should learn to be suspicious of the capabilities of small startups having to suddenly cope with massive populations of users.
Especially if the Government mandates that they must.
*pun. Not intended, but still a pun.
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